The twists and turns that led Archduke Franz Ferdinand to fall to a bullet from Bosnian Serb teenager Gavrilo Princip, whose motives are still in dispute, and set in motion the Great War

Police capture a suspect, second from right, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Princip fired the shots that assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie.

Imagine, as historian Margaret MacMillan asks us to, a pre-war landscape with people walking through it. It is summer. 1914. “People at the horse races,” she suggests. “People by the seaside.” Sylvan scenes, Edwardian and golden.

“There’s a lovely description in Stefan Zweig’s memoirs,” MacMillan continues, on the phone from Oxford. “Being at the beach at Ostend and the little cheerful coloured umbrellas and the kites flying and people on the beach and suddenly the wind getting cooler and the breezes beginning to pick up and people getting nervous and suddenly everyone rushes for home.”

Zweig, the Austrian writer and pacifist not yet in the full flower of fame, had been holidaying at the small seaside resort of Le Coq, observing the young people dancing in front of the cafés along the seawall, noting the nationalities “peacefully assembled together.” German intonations rang clearly in the air, he would write, for vacationers from the nearby Rhineland “had long shown a preference for the Belgian seacoast.”

Why should there be talk of war in this era of progress, in this time of growing prosperity, in this summer that Zweig deemed beautiful as never before? “Why,” he wondered, “should we be concerned with these constant skirmishes with Serbia?” And what, he asked, “did the dead Archduke in his catafalque have to do with my life?” The archduke who was little loved by his own people. The archduke with the steely eyes who despite being the heir apparent to the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire was not much mourned.

The summer days grew dark. The breezes foreboding. By July’s end, vacationers were flooding for home. The trains overflowed. Zweig too booked a ticket. “At once,” he would write many years later, “an icy wind of fear blew over the beach and swept it bare.”

JUNE. 1914.

Across a rough landscape a young man, scrawny and sallow, makes his way westward. He has beaky features, emphasized by a trim little goatee and a thin, sharp moustache. He is moving overland from the Serbian capital of Belgrade toward the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. The weather is damp. His name is Gavrilo Princip and he is not alone.

Princip is Bosnian by birth, raised in a mud-floored shanty in the tiny village of Obljaj, close by the northwestern border of Herzegovina. Further to the west lies the Adriatic. To the east, Serbia. In the lands beyond are scattered the fragments of a once mighty Serb empire not seen in unity since the 14th century — Srem, Backa, the Banat — an empire defeated at the Battle of Kosovo by the Ottoman Turks who slew the Serb army on the Field of Blackbirds. The date, significantly, was June 28, 1389.

Schoolboys would learn of this, for they would be shown a map of the lands where the Serbs once lived, a constellation of regions and a scattering of faiths far beyond what would come to be known as “Serbia.”

The fractured disintegration ultimately placed Bosnia and Herzegovina, via the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, under the “administration” of the dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary. (The treaty granted independence to Serbia.) In October 1908, when Gavrilo Princip was 14, the aging Emperor Franz Joseph extended his suzerainty, formally annexing the provinces.

Who was this boy who lived under the rule of this emperor? How malleable, or how independent, was the young man who would one day stand trial and say of his people: “That they are completely impoverished; that they are treated like cattle. The peasant is impoverished. They destroy him completely. I am a villager’s son and I know how it is in the villages. Therefore I want to take revenge, and I am not sorry.”

British author Tim Butcher, a journalist of the adventurer class, retraced Princip’s footsteps for his recently released The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War.

Within the remains of the family homestead in Obljaj he found the young man’s initials engraved on a stone, as if prefiguring the infamy that would one day come. (Family lore has it that Princip remarked that he left this reminder so that “one day people will know my name.”) He learned of the migration of the family, Serb adherents to Orthodox Christianity, which had travelled north from Montenegro in the mid-18th century. And of the indentured life that followed.

“This is not the Downton Abbey of beautiful Edwardian Europe,” Butcher elaborates in an interview. “This is a much more harsh reality. Our pathetic nostalgia for pre-1914 colours our view, makes us think it was all stable, peaceful, that everyone was comfortable.”

Six of Princip’s siblings died. Three survived. The illiteracy rate nudged 90 per cent. Butcher notes that a police report from 1914 includes a standard form at the time, with a heading that demands, “To whom does this serf belong?” And another entitled “reputation,” under which an officer has remarked of Gavrilo, “a weak boy.”

“Yes, he was a weak boy as much as he was small,” Butcher states. “But having done the walk myself it’s not for the faint of heart.”

As a 13-year old, Gavrilo, or Gavro in the affectionate diminutive to his family, travelled from Obljaj to Sarajevo to continue his education at the Merchants’ School. Butcher believes that it was on this overland trip to Sarajevo that Princip’s “rage against the foreign ruler took root.”

It is undoubtedly true that Princip’s parents wanted a better life for their middle son.

Stenographic notes from interviews conducted with Martin Pappenheim, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna when Princip was 20, provide some insights into the boy’s character. Princip describes himself as “always still” and “always alone” and an excellent pupil to the fifth grade. “Fell in love. Began to understand ideals . . . read a lot of anarchist, socialist, nationalist pamphlets.” He would sleepwalk as a teen. He was not a bed wetter. (The hallmarks of the Freudian school seep through here.)

Butcher believes Princip would have been struck wide-eyed by the transition to life in Sarajevo, circa 1907. “Fifty thousand people. Electric trams! I mean they didn’t even have them in Vienna.”

He unearthed the young student’s school records. “Hidden for more than a hundred years within Sarajevo’s shifting and sometimes arcane network of officialdom, the reports catalogue in meticulous detail a student going off the rails,” he writes. In his first school year in Sarajevo, Princip was a Grade A student. He moved six times in four years. Butcher found that in his final year his highest grade was a B — in gymnastics. Otherwise he was a D-level performer.

What had happened?

The loner had found a community in a group called Mlada Bosna.

In The War That Ended Peace, Margaret MacMillan describes Mlada Bosna, or Young Bosnia, as a group of “fanatical Slav nationalists.” University of Cambridge historian Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, writes that Mlada Bosna was “an aggregation of groups and cells of revolutionary youth operating across [Bosnia] from around 1904.”

Having left the countryside to study and work, these Young Bosnians, MacMillan writes, “found much in the modern world bewildering and disturbing.” MacMillan is not the first to compare these revolutionary youth to extremist Islamic fundamentalists of a century later.

“Like these later fanatics, the young Bosnians were usually fiercely puritanical, despising such things as alcohol and sexual intercourse. They hated Austria-Hungary in part because they blamed it for corrupting its South Slav subjects . . . They shared their few possessions, slept on each other’s floors, and spent hours over a single cup of coffee in cheap cafes arguing about life and politics. They were idealistic, and passionately committed to liberating Bosnia from foreign rule and to building a new and fairer world.”

Not uncharacteristically, they were emboldened by martyrdom. In the words of Christopher Clark, Young Bosnia’s “great hour” arrived on June 3, 1910, when Bogdan Zerajic, a Serbian student from Herzegovina, fired five shots at Bosnia governor Marijan Varesanin. “When all his bullets went wide, Zerajic emptied the sixth and last round into his own head,” Clark writes in Sleepwalkers.

Zerajic was hailed as a hero, his grave turned to a shrine. Among those who made pilgrimages there was Gavrilo Princip, who would visit alone and often stay the night.

In February 1912, Princip failed to sit an exam. Three months later, in May, 1912, he was on his way to Belgrade.

For all that, the agreed facts are slim. Princip hung out with Bosnian nationalists at the Zirovni Vijenac, or Green Acorn café in Belgrade. He aligned himself with the like-minded Nedeljko Cabrinovic, a typographer who fancied himself an intellectual, and Trifko Grabez, a onetime classmate. He practised shooting a Browning revolver at Belgrade’s bucolic Topcider Park. Princip would one day state, as would Cabrinovic, that it was a small newspaper announcement of the pending royal visit that focused the assassination plot.

But what was this “fairer world” of which Margaret MacMillan speaks? What ends were to be accomplished? And were the young men agents of other dark forces, known and unknown?

In the spring of 1911, a secret organization known as the Black Hand was founded in Belgrade, seeking the unification of Serbdom. One of its founders, Dragutin Dimitvijevic, would rise through the ranks of the Serbian army, becoming a lieutenant-colonel in 1913. To Christopher Clark, the manipulation of a young Gavrilo Princip and his fellow idealists lies here. It was Dimitvijevic who was “the real author of the conspiracy,” Clark states.

It is a supposition that Tim Butcher rejects out of hand. “I find no primary historical proof that this young man was connected to Serbia,” he says. “There isn’t the evidence.”

It is a crucial point of argument. One view supports the rising power of the ethnic Serb movement, almost a shadow government, if you will, and a neat justification for the next trigger point, Austria’s attack on Serbia.

Butcher dismisses such causation as having been “politicized by Vienna for their own grubby reasons.”

He paints Princip and his compatriots as seeking a multiethnic unification of all the peoples in the Slovenski jug — the Slavic south. Or as we know it, Yugoslavia.

There never was a proper police investigation to shade in the unknown, a point that bolsters the theory of those who see the hand of the Serbian government behind the assassination.

We do know that in the spring of 1914, three 19-year-olds hatched a plan to travel westward from Belgrade to Sarajevo and to there murder the heir to the throne.

On the day of the assassination, Nedeljko Cabrinovic had a photograph taken of himself, “so something would remain of me.”

JUNE 28. 1914.

The morning, as an army of historians have noted, shone sunny and bright as if to suggest that peace reigned over the land.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Countess Sophie Chotek, travelling separately from Vienna, had reunited at the Hotel Bosna at Ilidze, 20 minutes by train from the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

The riverside retreat was idyllic and of some renown. “The baths of Ilidze were known to the Romans, and a piece of mosaic at the back of the Hotel Bosna remains to tell the tale,” wrote English travel writer Maude Holbach as the first decade of the 20th century drew to a close. The hotel had created a chapel expressly for the royal couple, the adjacent woods were plump with chamois and deer, which suited the hunting-obsessed archduke, and the wariness that preceded the royal visit had dissipated by the night before the couple’s trip to the capital. “Everywhere we have gone here, we have been treated with so much friendliness,” Countess Sophie remarked to a wary Bosnian who had cautioned against the trip. “And by every Serb too.”

Townsfolk in the capital turned out for the royal visit on that sunny day for a first-hand look at the replacement heir. The emperor’s only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, had died a scandalous death at Myerling a quarter-century before, a gunshot murder-suicide at his mistress’s side. The emperor’s wife, the Empress Elisabeth, the beautiful Sisi, was assassinated a near decade later, stabbed through her leather corset as she was about to board a holiday steamer.

The emperor himself, approaching his 84th birthday, was increasingly mocked as doddery and out of touch. He had been disapproving of his nephew’s plan to marry Sophie, agreeing to the marriage only on the condition that it be deemed morganatic — upon the death of the archduke their children could lay no royal claims.

Had the archduke inherited the throne, however, the world might have enjoyed a very different outcome. “He was hot-tempered, he was conservative, he was reactionary perhaps,” says Margaret MacMillan. “He didn’t much like Slavs, he didn’t much like Hungarians, he didn’t much like Jews … But he was at least sensible in recognizing that Austria-Hungary would be mad to go to war, that it would probably mean the end of it.”

On that June morning the archduke was handsome in his blue tunic; the Countess Sophie summery in white; the luxury Gräf & Stift coupé in which they would ride a handsome grey. The car was owned by Count Franz von Harrach, who joined the royal couple, sitting in the front. Oscar Potiorek, the governor of Bosnia detested by the assassins, rode in the rear-facing seat.

Three others had been recruited to join the assassination plot, including a Bosnian Muslim by the name of Muhamed Mehmedbasic who stood, armed with a bomb, along the motorcade route. But Mehmedbasic failed to act as the car passed.

Nedeljko Cabrinovic was standing beside a lamp post on the sunny side of the Miljacka River, which flows picturesquely through the capital along Appel Quay. In his belt was a bomb. In his pocket the cyanide means to quickly end his life in the wake of the assassination.

The car approached. Cabrinovic cracked the green detonator cap against the lamp post and tossed it toward the automobile. “I threw it and then I saw how the late Ferdinand turned toward me with a cold, inflexible gaze,” he would state at trial.

Some reports would have the archduke batting the bomb away. Cabrinovic would testify that it bounced off the folded roof of the Gräf & Stift. Either way, it fell to the ground and exploded not upon the archduke’s group, but the car behind, wounding its passengers and setting in motion a turn of events that still seems inexplicable 100 years on.

Who could have predicted that the archduke would insist on attending to the hospital where the wounded were being treated? Or, even less likely, that he would demand that the day’s planned program would resume? Or that news of a slightly rejigged motorcade route, hastily imagined in order to throw off any loitering anarchists, would fail to reach the driver’s ears?

On Franz Joseph St., Gavrilo Princip was standing outside Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen and café, the turning point for the motorcade as initially planned. As the motorcade turned right off Appel Quay, taking the corner at Franz Joseph, Potiorek yelled at the driver to reverse to Appel Quay. The car stopped and in this moment Princip stepped forward, drew his Browning, fired twice, and set the course of history.

Count Harrach, who had been standing on the running board on the opposite side, would report that a thin stream of blood spurted from His Highness’s mouth. As Harrach pulled out a handkerchief he heard the countess exclaim, “In Heaven’s name, what has happened to you?”

The countess herself had been shot in the abdomen and quickly collapsed into her husband’s lap. The archduke, shot in the neck, pleaded, in Harrach’s account, for his beloved wife to not die.

The couple was rushed to the governor’s palace. The countess was already dead. The archduke would die soon after.

Nedeljiko Cabrinovic was apprehended on the riverbank, his suicide attempt having failed, the cyanide causing him to vomit. Princip too was arrested. In October he would stand trial alongside his co-conspirators. When asked at trial what kind of ideas he had, Princip replied: “I am a Yugoslav nationalist and I believe in the unification of all South Slavs in whatever form of state and that it be free of Austria.”

Youths at the time of the assassination, for they were all under the age of 20, the trio escaped the death penalty. Princip was sentenced to 20 years in jail, with the 28th of each month to be spent in a dark cell. He died of tuberculosis in the spring of 1918.

On Friday, in recognition of the centenary of the assassination, a statue of Princip was unveiled in Sarajevo. Terrorist, fanatic, freedom fighter, hero?

History records no clear answer.

One hundred years ago, June 28, 1914, Stefan Zweig was in Baden where Beethoven loved to spend his summer holidays and where “lighthearted visitors” would stroll the park. The news of the assassination travelled quickly — the spark, the trigger.

“I was simultaneously aware of the wind in the trees, the chirping of the birds, and the music that was wafted toward me from the park,” Zweig wrote. “And so it was that I suddenly stopped reading when the music broke off abruptly. I did not know what piece the band was playing. I noticed only that the music had broken off. Instinctively I looked up from my book. The crowd which strolled through the trees as a single, light, moving mass, also seemed to have undergone a change; it, too, had suddenly come to a halt. Something must have happened.”

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